Children's Periodicals and Their Readers: Methods and Comparative Approaches
Description
This seminar sets out to examine the comparative possibilities of studying the “children’s periodical”. Given its unique ephemeral form and its inherent relationship with time (seriality of production, or speed of circulation and consumption), scholars have rightly emphasized on studying the periodical as an autonomous genre in its own right (Beetham 1989; Latham and Scholes 2006; Nijhawan 2012). Approached from the perspective of children’s literature scholarship then, children’s periodicals, irrespective of their local context or language, raise some common and comparative questions. These questions may pertain to the production processes of periodicals and their accessibility to child readers, editorial attitudes and experiments with different genres and modes of children’s reading, the tension between commercialization of magazines and pedagogic agendas, their importance as material objects of childhood, and children’s readership experiences and the communities they gave rise to.
Monographs on children’s periodicals by scholars such as Kristine Moruzi, Paul Ringel, Lorinda B. Cohoon, Kelly Boyd, among others, as well as the recent The Edinburgh History of Children’s Literature (2024) have highlighted the fact that the children’s periodical is a textual and visual form to think with, not just to study about. Despite such exciting and much needed work on the children’s periodical in the recent past, studies of the children’s periodical remain tied to context-focused methodologies. This seminar aims to bridge this gap by bringing together a transregional group of scholars and the diverse archives they work with, to mine potential comparative methodologies and approaches to children’s periodicals.
Paper abstracts related to all aspects of the children’s periodical are invited such as:
Archives of children’s periodicals
Children’s Periodicals and histories of publishing and circulation
Commercial, religious and/or pedagogic agendas
Form, formats and editorial formulae
Paratexts, Advertisements and Illustrations
Multiple genres
Serialized writing
Local production, global exposure
Readers and Editors’ Interactions
Readership Communities and Voluntary Groups
Children’s Periodicals and Intermediality (advertising, cinema, photography, broadcasting, new media, etc)
Children as periodical makers